Where Facts and History Meet Myth and Legend: Groups or Communities in the Marvels of India Stories Model

Dionisius A. Agius
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Dionisius A. Agius: Dionisius A. Agius is Fellow of the British Academy, Emeritus Al Qasimi Professor of Arabic Studies and Islamic Material Culture at University of Exeter and Affiliate Adjunct Professor at King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia.

India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, 2020, vol. 76, issue 3, 392-410

Abstract: The c Aja-’ib al-Hind ( Marvels of India ) is a collection of sea stories allegedly compiled by Captain Buzurg Ibn Shahriya-r (d. 399/1009) which belongs to an Arabo-Islamic literary genre called the c aja-’ib, containing themes of entertainment—things that are marvellous and strange. But these stories are not merely entertaining, they are an additional resource for the modern researcher because they also reflect the realities of daily life in seafaring communities of the Indian Ocean in the ninth and tenth centuries. Among the tales of the fantastic and the marvel, we find the simple humanity of the seafarers, something lacking in the purely factual, medieval, geographical and historical texts. A complementary model to the understanding of the maritime landscape of a group or community is proposed in this article. The stories model in this article demonstrates the relationship of an occupational group with other seafarers in a trans-regional Indian Ocean trade.

Keywords: stories model; Marvels of India; maritime landscapes; community or group identity; nautical data; fact and fiction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:indqtr:v:76:y:2020:i:3:p:392-410

DOI: 10.1177/0974928420936132

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